February 5, 2002	Tuesday	Ziqa’ad 21, 1422

SIYA SANG (Afghanistan): Rahim Dad had eight mouths to feed, and the drought had stolen his crops, his oxen and his goats, so he sold the most valuable asset he had left - his 12-year-old daughter.

“I sold my daughter for money because of the hunger,” he says, shivering with fever in the chill of his mud and chaff house. “I sold my daughter to save the other people in my family, to save them from dying.”

And so Aziz Gul was contracted in marriage to a distant relative on the far side of the gorge that cuts off this village from the outside world, for a down payment of two million Afghanis - about $70.

This is Jawand district, a place of majestic red canyons, an awful gnawing poverty and raging tuberculosis, squarely in that swath of Afghanistan that aid agencies call the ‘hunger belt’. Villages like here will see little or nothing of the $4.5 billion that America, the EU, Japan and other countries pledged for Afghanistan in Tokyo last month.

Dollar bills and Afghanis do not circulate here; the preferred local currency is food aid: wheat in denominations of 50kg sacks with point of origin in bold blue letters, USA.

Here, as is in nearly all the 380-odd villages of Jawand, hunger and disease ravage the population, culling babies, women and the elderly. The living stagger on, coughing their lungs and their lives out with tuberculosis. People are so weakened by hunger that even flu can kill.

Men in their twenties and thirties have the stick-like calves and upper arms of children. New mothers produce no milk. Children are shrunken and listless. Wedding rings slide off skeletal fingers, and watch bracelets hang slackly from wasted wrists.

The food aid arriving now may not save them. Many people weigh less than the 50kg sacks of wheat they lug home - on their backs because their donkeys died or were sold. At least four men died on the 24-hour trek to their villages with their sacks of wheat in January.

This was the future staring at Rahim Dad when he sold his first-born daughter. He spent the money on flour, rice and tea, and the relative luxuries of soap and sweets. He says he has enough food left for 10 days. At these margins of human existence, the survival instinct rules over sympathy for 12-year-old Aziz Gul.

“She was crying. She was not happy that she was engaged by force. But I could not do anything, and I can’t worry about her,” says her grandmother, Yaman. Rahim Dad interrupts: “If we had not sold her, the whole family would have died of hunger.” Among the 45 families here, there is no stigma attached to the sale of an underage daughter, only resignation.

The graveyard that unrolls along the slope next to the village has four fresh plots. One belongs to Soraya’s husband, another to her baby girl. They were carried off within days of each other in early December, husband Abdul Hamid by tuberculosis, and daughter Tabarukh, who died before she learnt to crawl, by malnutrition. Soraya’s milk dried up a fortnight after Tabarukh was born.

She tried to sustain her on naan bread crumbled into black tea, but Tabarukh withered and died, aged 10 months. Her last surviving child, Abdul Basir, 10, is waxen-faced, with pinched features.

He sits on the dirt floor huddled in the sole means of protection from the cold that seeps into the mud room: a discarded wheat sack stuffed with foam. There is no stove, and Soraya sold her quilts and kitchen utensils for food.

It is the same story throughout Jawand, but one that will go largely untold because these mountain hamlets are so isolated and remote. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.